Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller was an American novelist, born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants. He grew up in the Coney Island neighborhood and, after the United States entered the Second World War, served as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Forces, flying dozens of combat missions in the Mediterranean, an experience that would furnish the material for his most famous work.

After the war Heller studied English and worked in advertising while writing fiction. His debut novel, Catch-22, published in 1961, is a darkly comic, structurally inventive satire of war and military bureaucracy set among American airmen in Italy. Its central paradox, the impossible logic by which a airman cannot escape combat duty, gave the English language the enduring phrase catch-22.

Though it sold modestly at first, Catch-22 became hugely influential, especially during the Vietnam era, and is now regarded as one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. Its absurdist humor and antiwar sensibility captured the madness of institutional power.

Heller wrote several more novels, including Something Happened and Good as Gold, though none matched the impact of his debut. He once wryly answered critics who said he had never written anything as good as Catch-22 by noting that neither had anyone else. He died in 1999, remembered for a single book that reshaped American literature.